The fitness folk

PETER Mulkearns is missing his first pre-season in more than 15 years, a football generation in which he's put men at three clubs through the pain that forges the bedrock of success. In the pre-Christmas sweat that falls on ovals, gym floors and far-away mountain trails, he knows the future can be told.

North Melbourne was in Utah last week, grinding out another of the high-altitude training camps that have become to an AFL club's preparation what leggings were to workouts post-Flashdance and Jane Fonda.

Mulkearns, who left the club at season's end, was in Europe, furthering his education at a strength and conditioning seminar, a sort of train spotter's gathering for fitness folk.

Where pre-season camps are concerned, he reckons Wayne Carey doesn't know what he missed (which in itself must be a rarity). He remembers the equivalent trip in his early mid-1990s years at Arden Street - two or three days in Lorne, running in the Otways and on the beach, bedding down in sleeping bags on the local basketball stadium floor.

When Mulkearns started at North, he effectively was the club's strength and conditioning department. The same at Carlton when he followed Denis Pagan to Princes Park in 2003. Less than a decade on, fitness personnel have become akin to missiles in football's sports science arms race.

Specialisation of roles has brought about far greater individualisation in the pre and post-game departments of conditioning and rehabilitation. Attention to detail - the Ross Lyon mantra - has become a key plank in the search for success.

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Performance analysts are commonplace, dissecting players' preparation on the track from a physical and decision-making perspective. Skill acquisition specialists, weights coaches, psychologists, biomechanists, physiologists are all full-time football club employees.

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Players have iPad apps for the daily routine of inputting ratings of health, muscle and joint soreness, sleep quality and the like.

Clubs can afford to regularly analyse blood and saliva in search of signs of fatigue from overtraining.

Presumably, ''Plugger'' Lockett, Danny Frawley and Greg Burns demolishing pizzas and stubbies on the drive back to Ballarat wouldn't have escaped scrutiny.

Discussed objectively and used as a prompt for sensible interventions, Mulkearns says this avalanche of information is a godsend. Yet there is a knack in trusting that the human being can still tell you more than the machine, in not letting data override decision-making.

Treat it as gospel, and workloads might be reduced or players kept off the track altogether, when in truth they might have been better served by pushing through. A word of advice from the guru of altitude training, Utah-based Dr Jim Stray-Gundersen, has stayed with him. Asked which blood markers best pointed to overtraining, Stray-Gundersen said: ''Ask the athlete how he feels.''

Continuity of training builds resilience and durability, even in the rehabilitating athlete.

Mulkearns is proud of the low injury rate at the clubs where he has worked, and is convinced it debunks the myth that training two days in a row increases susceptibility to injury.

Pagan had the balls out at the first pre-season session in 1996, and was a big advocate of his men doing something every day. His training philosophy was doubtless influenced by a conviction that ''the strong will survive'', but Mulkearns says the coach always listened to his charges, too. He loved it when he said, ''I've got full confidence in ya, son.''

Dealing with Gen Y has brought other changes. Not so long ago, Robert Scott was a rarity in constantly asking, ''Why?'' and, ''What's this doing for us?'' Now, education sessions are part and parcel of a pre-season for players who read the fine print in their training programs and aren't too shy to question it.

Mulkearns believes players today are undeniably more athletic and capable of greater physical feats, the leaping, gut-busting products of better and more scientific training.

A club's challenge is striking the right balance, not losing sight of the belief that coaching is front-and-centre, science the support act.

Knowing exactly where your group is at is critical. Intense musculo-skeletal screening in Brad Scott's early days at North revealed that, on the whole, his players lacked the core strength and motor control to manage heavy workloads. For a time, much work was done without obvious results, confusing and frustrating those who were feeling pain without gain.

Mulkearns says Scott has a passion to be at the cutting edge, that preparation of his players will mirror his own in the quest to become aerobic beasts. Carey, Luke Ball, Lenny Hayes, Brent and Robert Harvey, Nick Riewoldt, John Blakey and Anthony Stevens are among the best trainers he has seen.

From the sweatshop floor, he has seen one constant in elite sporting success: hard work in the pre-season. Those Pagan premiership teams of 1996 and '99 were marked by a work-hard, play-hard mentality, with captain Carey leading the way. They were, Mulkearns recalls, ''a team of hardened men''. Winning in September before players have reached their physical peak is a curve football teams rarely jump.

He isn't anti-sports science by any stretch, but knows that all the new-age training in the world can't fast forward maturity. When he returned to North three seasons ago, he was struck by how many players' bodies were still developing. ''There's no way I could have asked the players of 2010 to do what the players of 1999 could do.''

That he believes Jack Ziebell is on his way to joining the above group who left nothing on the track is an indicator that North Melbourne is edging closer. That Ziebell is about to turn 22 and immersed in his fifth senior pre-season is a sobering thought for the 100 kids who were drafted on Thursday night.

No matter how good they are tipped to be, they won't get there until their bodies let them. Their work has just begun.